Guest post written by A Family Matter author Claire Lynch
Claire Lynch has a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is a professor of English and creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and on BBC Radio. She lives in Windsor, England, with her wife and three daughters.
About A Family Matter (out 3 June 2025): A young wife following her heart. A husband with the law on his side. Their daughter, caught in the middle. Forty years later, a family secret changes everything in this “perfect” (Elin Hilderbrand) debut novel.
I like to blame it on a children’s picture book. When my twin daughters were very small, they loved Two is for Twins with an unwavering passion. If you haven’t read it, you’ll know of other brilliant books just like it. Books with colourful illustrations, chew-resistant pages, a jolly rhyme scheme. The premise of this particular picture book is simple but effective: being a twin is awesome. Being a toddler is pretty great at the best of times, but if there’s two of you to empty out the cupboards and wear your underwear as a hat, the opportunities are endless. The book is twin propaganda, and my twins swallowed it whole. The trouble for me began on the last page. There, in the final lines, the picture book twins, and henceforth our twins, rejoiced in the pronouncement: ’On their birthday mommy makes, can you guess…TWO birthday cakes!’
Like any ridiculous corner parents paint themselves into, it started quite reasonably. I bought a teddy-shaped cake tin and made a cake, then, I simply made another. When the twins were two-years-old I attempted, naturally, two, two-tiered cakes. When the girls turned four and had a pirate-themed party, I made two confetti cake treasure chests, overflowing with candy treasure. By the time they were seven, I was setting aside a full working day to make two rainbow layer cakes, still adding sprinkles as the bouncy castle was set up in the back garden. Anyone could see it was threatening to get out of hand.
Over those early years of my kids’ childhoods, the birthday cakes became a tradition, but also something like a legal requirement I was contractually bound to obey. In the weeks leading up to their birthday, the children would present me with carefully drawn diagrams, neatly coloured in felt-tip pen with labels and arrows pointing out the essential details on the frosting. Year after year their designs became increasingly elaborate, never once taking into consideration my limited skills as a baker. Perhaps, that is exactly the point. My daughters believe I can make the cakes they want and so, each year, I try my best to do it.
My talent as a baker, if such a word can even be applied, is, in reality, an excess of plucky effort meeting an immovable deadline. Any skill I do have has been picked up through this annual practice and the misguided belief that watching baking shows on TV counts as studying. However successful (or otherwise) the outcome, I’m always glad to have tried. When I look back through the family photo album, pictures of the children blowing out their candles are like an archive of their childhood passions. One year it’s Bluey’s bedroom, the next an ode to Batgirl. For our youngest daughter’s first birthday, I can see from the photographs that I must have completely lost my mind. In that first year of her life Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt with its beautiful illustrations by Helen Oxenbury had already become a treasured book for her. Someone less sleep deprived would have taken the obvious option and baked a bear cake. I already had the tried and tested cake tin after all. Instead, I took the utterly unhinged decision to bake three different cakes, as if a one-year-old might call me out on simplifying the plot in cake form. The photographs from that day show a happy little girl, some very tired parents, and an excessive number of cakes representing a snow storm in royal icing, a ‘deep cold river’ in marbled blue food colouring, as well as a large chocolate sponge in place of the ‘thick oozy mud’.
Because they reflect whatever was popular for that child in that particular moment, the cakes are like personal time capsules. The photographs of my youngest child on her fourth birthday show her proudly beside a classic of the genre, an Elsa doll, entombed up to the waist in a great domed dress of sponge cake. There must be photos like this in family albums all over the world. Little children at the peak of their devotion to Elsa, or Spiderman, or whoever it may be, blowing out their candles in one wish-laced breath.
Of course, the twins picture book can only take so much of the responsibility. It was just one of the countless ways I have absorbed other peoples’ ideas of what mothers are supposed to be and do. No parent is immune from those ominous warnings on social media, the hours are long but the years are short, remember? The fear-mongering posts that appear as the school holidays come around, you only have eighteen summers to enjoy with your children. Only eighteen birthdays, too then, to show your love in frosting and chocolate.
I’m happy to admit that I have made a ritual out of making my children’s birthday cakes. I see that it is as much about me as them. So much of parenting can feel like being your child’s executive assistant, making sure they’re in the right place with the right equipment, bearing the right kind of nut-free snack.
I understand that I could stop, do less. I could buy birthday cakes. But it has come to mean something to all of us now. Anyone who has ever had a child present them with a craft project that is half dried macaroni, half paper made perpetually soggy with glue will know, it is never the outcome, but the gift of time and effort that matters.
I joke sometimes that I will keep the tradition going forever. Baking their adult preferences and hobbies into birthday cakes, marzipan figures at a pilates class maybe, or gingerbread cookies celebrating a prompt tax return. Assuming, of course, that Elsa and Batgirl don’t remain popular longterm.
It is only repeating the obvious to say that parenting is an endless balancing act. There is always worry, and guilt, as well as the best of intentions. I know that sometimes I will have to work when my children want me to play. I won’t always say the right things in front of their friends, or give them the answers they want, but I will make their birthday cakes for as long as they want me to. The yearly reminder that we have so much to celebrate.
